The Wizard of Gore

Reel DVD

R4 DVD

This is a remake of a 1970s film by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Since I have not seen the original we will just look at the current version.

Edward Bigelow is a reporter running and producing his own small newspaper covering the underground world in Los Angeles. He finds out about a magic act that is supposed to be a cut above the average, so with his girlfriend in tow he watches a performance. He is impressed. Montag the Magnificent (played by a demented Crispen Glover) has an act that involves picking a random girl from the audience, stripping her, then killing her in a gruesome manner. All the while Montag is running a continuous patter about the nature of reality and your own perception of it. Just as the audience is about to leave, scared and revulsed, he reveals the girl to the audience perfectly unharmed.

Bigelow visits the show again and the same thing happens to a different girl who is killed in a different way, then is revealed unharmed on stage once more. The only jarring note is that the girls are turning up dead the next day, suffering the same sort of injuries that Montag inflicted on them during his stage show.

Bigelow is suspicious. Is Montag working some sort of mass hypnosis or drugging the audience somehow? Could it be just coincidence? As more girls die Bigelow starts to question his own sanity. Could he really be murdering them? He has strange memories, but gaps are appearing in his real memory. His girlfriend, far more practical, takes a computer and miniature camera to the show and records what Montag is really saying to the audience. The results are terrifying but as Bigelow closes in on Montag, so Montag is closing in on Bigelow.

The film is thankfully not as much of a gorefest as it could have been. I think too much gore would have detracted from the plot, which is strong enough to stand by itself as a masterpiece of terror. There are some odd bits in the film, such as why Bigelow seems to be stuck in a 1930s timewarp in his clothing and dislike of modern electronics, but apart from being slightly confusing they don’t detract from the film. It is a superb piece of suspense and horror as it is.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No. 4 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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